From left to right: Wendy Goldstein, Sarah Goldman & Fonda Dubb.

What's it like to be blind? The sea, forests, birds or even one's fellow human beings, each face so distinctly different from the other. How does one paint that which one has never seen? These must have been some of the thoughts going through the minds of the members of the ESRA Knitting Club, mainly English speakers, as they waited in the Youth Center in Raanana for the arrival of Sarah Goldman. A blind landscape artist, accomplished knitter and musician from Eilat, she had called in on her cell to say, "We're held up in the traffic coming into Raanana."

"Oh vey! She's driving?" questions someone in disbelief. No, she was not driving but the thought was not so fanciful. "I can do everything but fly," she tells everyone she meets. She was invited to address the club, "Because we had heard that she is such an inspiration to others," says Wendy Goldstein, a former South African and chairlady of the Knitting Club.

Sarah arrives and after a short introduction everyone's knitting needles were feverishly at work. Standing in front of the group, Sarah was knitting row after row in different colors and giving instructions as well as holding up the garment-in-making so all could see. Yes, to see.

But what does Sarah see? "I see you all. Isn't Wendy beautiful?" All forty members of the Raanana Knitting Club agree. The chairlady blushes.

After the knitting lesson, Sarah takes out a flute and breaks into "Oh, Susanna". Everyone joins her as the words "I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee" filter down the corridor of the Youth Center. People poke their heads in to see what is going on. They join in the singing and then they marvel at some of her paintings that she holds up. The previous evening there had been an exhibition of Sarah's work at the Cultural Center in Herzliya.

She holds up a painting entitled "Genesis". It's divided into sections depicting the various stages of creation. There is the dark, then the blue sky, the sea and the land. Animals roam and man stands proud. Life's journey has begun. But it is Sarah's personal journey that everyone in the room that morning was marveling at.

Sarah had not been born blind and yet she has never seen. A premature baby, she had been placed in an incubator, unfortunately, at too high a temperature. "My little eyes were scorched and when they took me out of the incubator the damage was done and there was nothing the doctors could do," she relates. However, instead of bitterness, she provided a romantic twist to the tale. Sarah's husband, also blind, is the same age as she is. "I was born on March 14th, he on the 23rd. I waited for him in the incubator."

The knitting ladies were also waiting - to hear more. One woman in the audience, a former American, Lynn Adler, stands up, "before you arrived this morning, Sarah, we were sitting around kvetching how tired and lazy we had become. How we don't do this anymore and how we don't do that and here you come along and say there aren't enough hours in the day. You truly are an inspiration to us all."

Sarah smiles and relates how she visits a seriously ill woman in Eilat three times a week. "She was on oxygen and had lost the will to live. She thought nobody loved her anymore but I told her the world loves her and I started taking her out for walks, sometimes even to the beach." People listened spellbound. "Yes," says Sarah. "People say it is I who see, not she." What Sarah sees are the needs of people and how she can help. She is also the secretary of a club and until recently had worked as a secretary in the Eilat municipality. How did she know what numbers to dial? "Easy, " she says,  "I memorize them. No problem!" That seems to be her attitude - "No problem." You accept the cards you are dealt in life and you get on with it.

During a week of embarrassing public behavior, spearheaded by the highest offices in the land being paraded as a refuge for reprobates, role models were in short supply. For the ladies of Raanana, meeting a woman like Sarah was a "breath of fresh air" remarked one of the youngest members of the Knitting Club, Ele Keil, a former Canadian who has just completed her army service. To crown it all, people heard that Sarah had recently lost 26 kilograms. "What can't this woman do?" the knitting ladies were wondering. Predictably, and yet so poignantly, Sarah concluded, "The only thing I can't do is fly." This crowd had their doubts.

David Kaplan is editor of the Telfed magazine and a former chairman of Telfed.